At first glance, a swordfish and a flounder couldn’t seem more different. One is a fast, streamlined hunter with a pointy nose, and the other is an oddly shaped bottom-dweller with one distorted eye on the opposite side of its face. Their bodies are worlds apart, but their genes tell a different story.

Alex Little from Queen’s University, Canada, has found that billfishes, like swordfish and marlin, are some of the closest living relatives to the flatfishes, like plaice, sole, flounder and halibut. This result was completely unexpected; Little was originally trying to clarify the relationship between billfishes and their supposed closest relatives – the tunas. That connection seems to make more sense. Both tunas and billfishes are among a handful of fish that are partially warm-blooded. They can heat specific body parts, such as eyes and swimming muscles, to continuously swim after their prey at extremely fast speeds with keen eyesight.

But it turns out that these similarities are superficial. Little sequenced DNA from three species of billfishes and three tunas, focusing on three parts of their main genome and nine parts of their mitochondrial one (a small accessory genome that all animal cells have). By comparing these sequences to those of other fish, Little found that the billfishes’ closest kin are the flatfish and jacks. Indeed, if you look past the most distinctive features like the long bills and bizarre eyes, the skeletons of these groups share features that tunas lack. Indeed, billfish and tuna proved to be only distant relatives. Their ability to heat themselves must have evolved independently and indeed, their bodies product and retain heat in quite different ways.

Little’s work is testament to the power of natural selection. Even closely related species, like marlins are flounders, can end up looking vastly different if they adapt to diverse lifestyles. And distantly related species like tuna and swordfish can end up looking incredibly similar because they’ve adapted to similar challenges – pursuing fast-swimming prey. This shouldn’t come as a surprise – a few months ago, a French team found that prehistoric predatory sea reptiles were probably also warm-blooded.

Forty-eight million years ago, some ants marched up to a leaf and gripped it tight in their jaws. It would be the last thing they would ever do. Their bodies had already been corrupted by a fungus that, over the next few days, fatally erupted from their heads. The fungus produced a long stalk tipped with spores, which eventually blew away, presumably to infect more ants. In time, all that was left of this grisly scene were the scars left by the ants’ death-grip. Today, David Hughes from Harvard University has found such scars in a fossilised leaf from Germany.

Today, hundreds of species of Cordyceps fungi infect a wide variety of insects, including ants. Like many parasites, they can manipulate the way their hosts behave. One species, Cordyceps unilateralis, changes the brains of its ant hosts so that they find and bite into leaves, some 25cm above the forest floor. The temperature and humidity in this zone are just right for the fungus to develop its spore capsules. In its dying act, the ant leaves a distinctive bite mark that’s always on one of the leaf’s veins on its underside. And that’s exactly what Hughes saw in his fossil leaf.

Hughes originally thought that the marks were made by an insect cutting the veins of the leaf to drain away any potential poisons, something that modern insects also do. But these marks look very different – those on the fossil leaf bear a much closer resemblance to those of Cordyceps-infected ants. This is the first fossil trace of a parasite manipulating its host, but it’s not the oldest evidence for such a relationship. In 2008, another American group found a 105-million-year-old piece of amber containing a scale insect, with two Cordyceps stalks sticking out of its head. The war between insects and their Cordyceps nemeses is an ancient one indeed.

Comments (6)

Regarding partially warm-blooded fish, every time I read about such things I remember that probably most people think of the main classes of animal life as being distinguished by (a) what they breathe, (b) what they have on their skin, and (c) the temperature of their blood. But you could probably write a book about exceptions to these generalisations (as a way of communicating the diversity of life), and if you did I might even read it (or at least look at the pictures).

Sir David Attenborough has a clip on the Cordyceps fungus infecting ants (and other insects). That clip is, or was, on youtube which I can’t access from work. I think it is from Life in the Undergrowth. It is well worth watching and comes complete with sad haunting music that makes you feel sorry for the insects.